Padres-Dodgers series will decide NL West in 2024

Back in March, the Dodgers and Padres kicked off the 2024 Major League season against one another in South Korea, splitting a pair of games. Six months and 310 total games later, they’ll face off for three more in Los Angeles beginning Tuesday, with the NL West title up for grabs. Despite being three games behind the Dodgers, the Padres are fully in control of their own destiny, given that they took seven of the previous 10 meetings this season and will thus hold the tiebreaker no matter what happens.

It’s exactly the kind of late-season race between the two rivals we expected way back when they faced one another in Seoul. Isn’t it?

Actually, no. Those were the expectations back in 2021, when San Diego acquired Yu Darvish, Blake Snell and Ha-Seong Kim, and we wondered before the season if it would be one of the best divisional races of all time. It was – but not for the Padres, who finished 28 games out as the 107-win Giants and 106-win Dodgers battled until the final day.

Those were the in-season expectations, perhaps, in 2022, when the Padres made the biggest splashes at the Deadline by trading for Juan Soto, Josh Hader and Josh Bell – and then promptly got swept by the Dodgers, being outscored 20-4, eventually finishing 22 games out of first. (They’d get their revenge in October.)

Those were definitely the expectations once again back in 2023, when San Diego, coming off a surprise trip to the NLCS the previous year, tried for Aaron Judge and Trea Turner before acquiring Xander Bogaerts, Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, all while expecting full seasons from Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., leading to some of the highest expectations in team history. It never really came together, largely due to wildly bad extra-innings luck, as the team finished 18 games out and let manager Bob Melvin depart to the rival Giants once the season ended.

But in 2024? This wasn’t exactly the outlook atop the NL West.

Obviously, the Dodgers had a huge winter, acquiring Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and others. Yet the San Diego outlook was far more muted, in part due to last season’s unmet expectations and in part due to the November 2023 passing of popular team owner Peter Seidler, who had welcomed the aggressive moves of previous years. Soto was traded to the Yankees in exchange for badly needed pitching, while Dylan Cease was added from the White Sox just before the Korea trip. The team had exactly one reliable outfielder in Tatis Jr., and never made any moves to support him on the grass.

FanGraphs projected San Diego to win 83 games and come in 10 games behind the Dodgers. At the All-Star break, that’s essentially what they were on track for, given their 50-49 record while sitting seven games out in the West.

It’s obviously gone better than that, for reasons both expected (the RISP/extra-innings silliness has gone away) and unpredictable (the trades for Luis Arraez and half the bullpen; the speed in which Jackson Merrill became a star; the entire existence of Jurickson Profar).

You can see the shape of the season via the playoff odds here. The Dodgers were always expected to make the playoffs, and they clinched a berth last Thursday. The Padres were just one of many teams in the Wild Card mix, and it took until late summer for that to finally change.

That, in part, is because both sides absolutely nailed their Trade Deadline additions. In Los Angeles, the Dodgers added Tommy Edman (119 OPS+ and six homers), Michael Kopech (three runs allowed in 21 games), and Jack Flaherty (3.40 ERA in nine starts, and a possible Game 1 playoff starter), while Mookie Betts and Max Muncy returned from injury. The Padres moved early to get Arraez in May, then went all-in on pitching in July, with the quintet of Tanner Scott, Bryan Hoeing, Jason Adam, Sean Reynolds and Martín Pérez posting a 1.81 ERA in 129 brown-and-gold innings so far.

But even if this isn’t exactly coming off the same preseason hype as we saw in 2021 and 2023, we’re finally getting that Southern California race we’ve been hoping on for years. The Dodgers, after all, have won a dozen NL West titles since the 2006 Padres of Mike Piazza, Trevor Hoffman and current Dodger manager Dave Roberts won 88 games … and took the division over the 88-win Dodgers thanks to a head-to-head tiebreaker. Sound familiar?

The question, then, becomes whether this upcoming series is the most impactful regular-season matchup between the two in the 55 years since the Padres joined the National League in 1969. (Emphasis on regular season here, since the Dodgers swept the Padres 3-0 in the 2020 Division Series before falling 3-1 to San Diego in a 2022 rematch.)

The Dodgers have won 55% of the 948 regular-season games played between the two, and 291 of those games have come in September or October. Of course, it’s relatively rare that both clubs are any good at the same time. The Dodgers had a dry period around the turn of the century, and the Padres were mostly a second-division club for the first 25 years or so of their existence, around a 1984 run to the World Series. So in trying to find where this series might rate against any previous head-to-head matchups, we actually end up taking out most of their respective histories.

First, remove full seasons in which one team didn’t even win 83 games. Then, also remove seasons in which the final win gap between them was more than five games, because we’re trying to find close matchups here. We’re left with only three seasons before this year – 1996, 2006 and ‘20 – and of course that last year was a shortened 60-game season. If we look at those years and find late-season matchups in which the Championship Leverage Index indicated the game was at least twice as important as an average regular-season game, we’re left with … just three other series across those two years that might come even close.

Sept. 15-18, 2006: The year that they tied for the division lead with 88 wins, the Dodgers – at the time a half-game up – welcomed the Padres to Dodger Stadium for four mid-September games. The teams split the series, though the final game ended up being one of the most memorable in Dodger history, that being the “4+1” game. In that one, Los Angeles came back from a 9-5 ninth-inning deficit thanks to back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs to tie the game – then, after allowing the go-ahead run in the top of the 10th, won on Nomar Garciaparra’s walk-off two-run shot in the bottom of the frame.

Sept. 19-22 and Sept. 27-29, 1996: This year, the Padres won the division by one game over the Dodgers, and the two sides faced off seven times in the last 10 games of the season. The Dodgers entered the final three games up by two, but San Diego won the first two games to set up a winner-take-all Game 162, which went scoreless into the 11th inning before Chris Gwynn’s two-run double gave San Diego the division.

And that … is it. It hasn’t exactly been decades worth of drama between the two. But the late-season competitive matchups we have had have turned out to be a blast, even if we don’t get another 4+1 game or another dramatic scoreless game in extras.

“It’ll be fun,” said Mookie Betts. “I’m sure [there will be] a lot of emotions and whatnot, so it’ll be fun. These are the games we dream of playing.”

The ones we dream of watching, too, even if this wasn’t necessarily the season we expected to see it. With six games remaining, with the division title drought nearing two decades, the Padres are finally in the position they’ve been trying to get to. If Mookie thinks it’s going to be fun, well, we could hardly disagree.